


It's a Moon, Not a Planet

by HarpiaHarpyja



Series: How Soon Unaccountable [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Actual Force Nerd Kylo Ren, Actual Force Nerd Rey of Jakku, Canon Compliant, Charged Lightsaber Spars, Cranky Rey of Jakku, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, Marooned on a Moon, Mutual Pining, Nature Walks for Science, Pedantic Kylo Ren, Post-TLJ, Rey Likes Kylo's Ship Wink Wink, Reylo - Freeform, Thank Your Dead Dad for Your Knowledge of Smuggler Hideouts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 06:45:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13921587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja
Summary: Weeks after going into hiding, Kylo Ren gives up blocking Rey's attempts to reach him. When she visits him on Charissia to get the full story, they find they still have many things to figure out beyond the workings of their bond in the Force.





	It's a Moon, Not a Planet

**Author's Note:**

> So this, and the next part, both ended up being significantly longer than those that preceded—we're getting both a Rey and Kylo part for each. They had a lot to talk about. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Thanks for reading!

For the first week, the greatest struggle was turning Rey away. 

It happened first within a day of his landing on Charissia, a return trip Kylo had not expected to make so soon, if ever. He had set up a temporary shelter until better arrangements could be made and was about to have a look around the pond-dotted grassland when he felt the air begin to deaden. He heard her. Just in his head. His name, his old name, once. Then a second time. He didn’t allow a chance for a third. Instead he resisted her, made his mind a wall and his will a barrier, and drove her out. He could no longer hear her, but he could feel her trying, and he could feel her mounting resentment at being rebuffed. 

It lasted like that for a few minutes, until she gave up. The air returned to normal, his mind quieted, and he found himself exhausted and cold, with a pain in his chest worse than the one he’d expected. The survey of the area had to wait until the next day, as did anything else, because all Kylo managed to do was crawl into the shelter as he was and drift into an uneasy sleep. 

Rey continued to try, twice a day, for the rest of that week. By the third day Kylo came to expect it and have a general idea of her timing, and he automatically began steeling himself for the barrage. Maintaining that barrier never became easier, but Rey’s determination began to falter, and her attempts petered out by the start of the second week. First to once a day, then once every few days. Finally, they stopped altogether. He knew he would still feel her, if he tried, but he also knew the risk that posed of drawing her attention. Encouraging her. So he didn’t.

Probably, she would jump to the worst conclusions based on the nature of the last conversation they had, incomplete as it had been. That couldn’t be helped. He knew he would contact her again, eventually. He hoped that by that point she wouldn’t have given up on him entirely. 

Still, he couldn’t help resenting just how deeply relieved he was when, nearly a month after he fled the dreadnought and the First Order at large, she immediately allowed him to reach her when he tried. She didn’t look very happy, or very anything at all, and she wasn’t very talkative. But she listened to what he had to say, which was admittedly sparse: coordinates, assurance that said coordinates were to a secure place, followed by what felt like the greatest risk of all, a request for her to come to him. She would need a few days to plan, she said, but she accepted with little indication of her feelings on the vagueness of the whole thing.

Kylo perceived her imminent arrival only an hour or so before it actually occurred, and was waiting at the treeline near the lake when her ship, an anonymous E-wing that surprised him even though it shouldn’t have—she couldn’t properly pilot the _Falcon_ alone—touched down. She shortly emerged, dressed in practical traveling clothes under an oversized leather jacket and carrying a large pack, and began marching his way.

He strode out to meet her, stopping a few steps short. Her face was difficult to decode, and Kylo wasn’t sure what to say. Part of him wanted to be immediately closer to her, to touch or hold her, maybe even kiss her. Something to compensate for every time he’d blocked her attempts to reach him. But there was a sharpness to her eyes that suggested such an action would not be well received right now. She had another purpose.

Instead, he tactlessly defaulted to a reprimand. “I told you not to try to contact me.”

“You thought I’d just obey?” Rey was watching him, too, and while her expression remained unreadable, he was pierced by a current of anticipation and apprehension running off her.

“Stupid of me, I know.”

Rey frowned, annoyed by his flip response. “We heard you were dead. I thought you might actually be, the first time I hit that barrier. Then I realized it had to be you doing it. I’d have felt if you died. So I kept trying.”

Kylo nodded, mostly untroubled by her casual, unquestioning admission of just how intimately tied they were. “It wasn’t easy. You were right. Blocking it off like that takes a lot. Hurts. Worse than just closing the connection when it’s already open.”

“If you’re looking for pity, try someone else.” Even as she said it, though, most of the fight went out of her. She took a few steps closer to him, hefting her pack higher onto her shoulders. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Alive, anyway.”

A silence fell and lingered, and he watched her eyes as they roamed over him, pausing here and there as if to touch. She was trying to figure out what he’d been doing, why he was here, if he was going to say anything else. He knew he should. He’d been the one to call her here, so he owed her an explanation.

When he didn’t provide one, she came nearer and said, like he might have forgotten, “I need you tell me what’s going on now. It’s been weeks. I’ve—we’ve—heard . . . rumors. Reports. Some of them conflicted. Some didn’t. The Resistance knows you and I worked together in Snoke’s throne room.”

His stomach flipped. He’d been expecting to hear a lot of things, but that was not one of them. He realized now it should have been. Not inclined to have this discussion while loitering at the edge of a forest, Kylo tilted his head and turned to walk further in. “Come with me. I’ll tell you everything I know, but it might take a while. We should sit.”

“We can’t just sit here?” She was following beside him despite her protestation.

“No.” That wasn’t remotely true, as there was no place on Charissia that would not have sufficed for their purposes. He’d been here long enough to confirm he was the only sentient being around. But Kylo wanted time to think about where to begin, which he now supposed he should have done in the days that passed as he waited for her, and the walk to the outpost would give him a few minutes for that.

Rey seemed to surmise the same, and permitted another silence for a short while. As they began to pass through a grassy bowl in the earth, which provided a break in the trees, she tilted her head back to look at the sky and said with certainty, “This is the planet you were on. That you told me about.”

“Moon.”

“What?”

“You called it a planet. It’s a moon. Not a planet.”

“Kriff, Ben, shut up.”

He should not have found her annoyance at his pedantry so endearing. “It’s called Charissia.”

“Hm. You did a good job describing it. This _moon_.” She was making fun of him, but it wasn’t ill-intended, and he tried to take it as a good sign. “Though the grass is greener than I imagined, and that lake was much larger.”

Kylo smiled but kept looking ahead. Once they got through the bowl and back into the wood, the abandoned settlement would not be far. “I think it’s the largest body of water here. But there are ponds, too, and a few streams.”

Rey nodded and remained silent for the rest of their walk. He glanced at her a few times and always found her looking around, up, or down, taking in the sights and maybe comparing those, too, with what he’d told her of them. It was unnerving to think that for once they were seeing the same things at the same time after so long. While he wouldn’t have minded talking more, Kylo found the quiet more conducive to organizing his thoughts, and he thought she likely appreciated the time to acclimate to the environment.

Still, they arrived at the outpost almost too fast. It was barely enough to be considered a settlement, just a collection of four small structures in various states of decay, arranged in a rough square around a space large enough to accommodate a small vessel or two—though its only occupant now was his TIE Silencer, which looked deeply out of place with its sleek, sharp lines and aggressive silhouette. There was a circle of stones that indicated the former presence of a primitive fire pit toward the eastern edge of the square. Set further back, a generator and a small fueling station had looked promising but proved defunct.

When he’d first arrived, Kylo hadn’t known the outpost was there at all. He’d found it a day or two later, while performing a survey in atmosphere. He’d been trying to conserve fuel, but doing the task on foot would have taken too long, and the moon was small enough that his ship could circle it several times without much waste. This place was the only suggestion that anyone else had ever been to Charissia and chosen to stay. He’d claimed it that same day, picking the least rundown building and beginning the work of making it livable. He’d done enough of a fine job that it was obvious which of the four had someone currently residing in it. Though while it was much better than the plastent he’d spent the first few nights in, it looked far from hospitable.

Rey slowed just inside the square and stood with her hands on her hips. “What is this place?”

“An old outpost, as far as I can tell,” he said, taking the moment to let her look around as he made an adjustment to a window he’d reinstalled the day before. 

“It feels very . . . secret.”

“It should. Smugglers used Charissia during the Galactic Civil War. Maybe the Clone Wars, too.” Kylo bent to see the pane more closely, looking for the gap he was certain was there. He’d heard the wind whistling through it last night, and the only thing that kept him from fixing it then was the lack of visibility. “It fell out of use just after. No one gives a damn about a place like this when there’s a Republic to rebuild.” That last came bitterly.

“How do you know about it, then?” Her voice made him jump. He hadn’t been expecting her to be right behind him. Kylo straightened and decided he would fix the window later. 

He moved away, indicating she should follow him inside. “Han told a lot of stories. It came up. I remembered.”

“Oh.” If she was sorry she brought it up, she didn’t say so. 

Rey stepped after him through the doorway, looking around as she had at the forest and the settlement in turn. It was a single-room house, little more than a hut, with enough remaining of a living space that Kylo now had a low bed, a table, a storage trunk, and a rudimentary area to prepare meals. A small fireplace was set into a recess in one wall. There were three windows, including the whistley one, but nothing to shut up the doorway. He didn’t really see a use for a door, but was still considering adding one when he found something to use for it. It occurred to him that Rey would be good at that sort of thing; maybe he would ask later, depending on how this went.

“Sit, if you like,” he said, waving a hand at the bed before placing his lightsaber on the table and taking a spot on the wooden floor for himself.

She looked at the bed, seemed to deem it too intrusive, and crouched across from him on the floor instead. Shrugging her pack off, she pulled open the flap and extracted a number of smaller bags, then settled herself to sit more comfortably. 

“Here.” Rey held two of the bags out to him with no further explanation as he took them.

“What’s this?”

“Look inside.” He gave her a puzzled look but acquiesced, and as he did so she said, “It’s mostly clothing and some food. I wasn’t sure of the size, but I think I guessed all right. And the food isn’t great, but I wasn’t sure what you might need.”

He glanced at the contents. It was indeed a couple of shirts, a pair of long trousers, and a pair of thick socks. The food was all packaged, plain, and utilitarian. He noted several packets of dried jogan fruit. “Kitchen raid?”

“And had laundry duty yesterday. Those are extras I doubt anyone will miss. Probably.” Rey shrugged. “Things get lost.”

The thought of such a forceful person as Rey doing laundry duty, and using it as an excuse to pilfer articles of clothing, was unexpectedly entertaining, and Kylo fought back a smile. But her gesture had also been remarkably kind, given that he hadn’t asked for or expected aid of that sort, so he said the only thing he was thinking. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She looked pleased and fidgeted with her pack, beginning to replace the other things she had removed. “Now. This is where you tell me what happened.”

“I’ll need you to do the same,” he told her evenly. They would each know things about this the other didn’t. It was, at least in part, why he’d asked her here. There would be a lot of information to get straight. There were other reasons, too, most of which boiled down to the extreme loneliness of being here, and Rey being the only person he wanted to fill it, even for a short while.

“That’s fine. But you first. Anything I’ve heard started with what happened in the Order, but I know not all of it is true, because if it were, you wouldn’t be here. And there must have been more that happened before.”

“Yes.” Kylo shifted. He was still trying to decide how far back to start. 

Rey noticed his dithering. She prompted, “Who are the Knights of the First Order?”

He blinked, and his brow crinkled. _The Knights of the_ First Order, _now_. So far, Rey had taken him aback twice with the information she bore. But at least this gave him some solid footing on which to begin.

“The Knights of _Ren_ ,” he began, meeting her eyes, “are—were—my . . . soldiers. When I destroyed Luke’s temple, some of the students joined me, rather than die. Or because they understood things as I did. Seven of them. And when I went to Snoke, so did they.”

Rey was watching him carefully. He could see that she was trying not to show judgment in her expression, but by now he thought he deserved more than a little, so any he saw in her eyes was easy to accept as he continued.

“He only wanted me, of course. But they were gifted in the Force. Not the way you or I are, but capable. So he found a use for them, as he did for me. Instated me as their de facto leader, trained us. It was an empty title, mostly, but for the fact that I was the reason they were there at all.”

“Did they want to be?” Rey’s voice was hard.

He shook his head. “They didn’t have a choice by then, or felt like they didn’t. But the First Order has a draw, despite what you think. If any of them were questioning when we began, it didn’t last long.”

She grimaced but didn’t say anything. Kylo took this as permission to continue.

“He began sending them out, individually or in pairs. Missions in Wild Space. Hunts for relics and artifacts of Force lore. Their sensitivity to the Force made them ideal for it. And it kept us all isolated from each other. He understood we could be dangerous together, but also that their usefulness outweighed any risk. That he was powerful enough to put insubordination to rest. And he wanted to keep me alone, and close.

“One was lost eventually. Just disappeared at the edge of galaxy. Maybe she ran, I don’t know. None of us could feel her in the Force after that. Two more were killed when Starkiller obliterated the Hosnian system.” 

That had been, Kylo was sure, an originally unintended but convenient punishment for his failures and weaknesses in the days directly leading to the weapon’s use. A reminder. He flexed his hand, digging his fingers into his knee for a few seconds before releasing it. 

Quietly, Rey said, “You cared about them.”

“Yes.” They had been his soldiers, but before that they had been his fellow students. Some had been his friends. They shared history and, after a point, culpability. Despite Snoke’s efforts to deteriorate those bonds, they had endured in some way. For a time. “I hadn’t had contact with the remaining four in over a year when you and I—when I killed Snoke. After that, and . . . the rest, I determined to call them back. There was no longer any need to maintain the ruse of their so-called duties whole systems apart. And I felt I needed them more, could give them worthier work. But Hux found out what you and I did. And he reached them first.”

Her jaw tightened, and she sounded on the verge of anger. “He found out? How?”

“Footage. Cameras. Security records.” 

In the end it had been such a simple, idiotic thing. He'd been a fool to think Hux would take his account at face value. Exactly how long Hux had known, Kylo wasn’t sure. But it must have been at least a month, maybe more. Maybe even within days of Snoke’s death and the attack on Crait. And then he’d planned, and he’d waited. Even when Kylo surprised him by calling the knights back, it was already too late. Kylo had probably only hastened his own undoing. They’d been bought with promises of prestige or license, a chance to unseat the usurper who had abandoned them.

“I don’t know where. The throne room. The turbolift, even. But he knew, and he won their support. When they returned to me I didn’t realize they were no longer mine until it was too late.”

Rey cursed, and Kylo wasn’t sure if it was directed at him or simply a general show of frustration. “That explains the rumors we’d heard. The gist, at least. That you betrayed the First Order. That you’d been bought by the Resistance, or had been working with it the whole time, or that you’d been . . . seduced by an agent of it. Me, in case you were wondering. Convinced to turn, take power, destroy it from within.”

Kylo would have laughed if recounting all of this wasn’t putting him in such a dark mood. “I gathered that. One of the knights warned me. They were coming to . . . I don’t know. Arrest me, imprison me, probably. That day, you and I were talking. It was a risk. But he told me what was about to happen and bought me enough time to escape. Only just.”

“They know you’re Leia’s son, too. They’ve used that to strengthen the claim you were working with the Resistance in some capacity. Not that it matters any longer one way or the other.”

Being told that, the way she said it— _you’re Leia’s son_ , a fact he was profoundly and painfully aware of—having it mentioned at all, twisted his heart. That would be the knights’ hand as well. They knew his history, by degrees; not as deeply as Snoke, but more than enough. Something Hux had never had the privilege of, until recently. 

It made him worry for his mother. It was something he couldn’t think about right now. 

“So they say I’m dead?”

“Yes. That you were tried and executed privately. We thought that was odd. That they wouldn’t have made it a public thing. An example of you.” Rey’s face was stony. “Well. Thanks to you, they’d already had it out for me. As far as the First Order is concerned, little has changed when it comes to my role. But . . .” 

“Your people know that we worked together.” He recalled her revelation shortly after her arrival. “You didn’t try to deny it?”

She looked at him with an acidic amusement in her eyes. “Why would I? I knew I couldn’t keep hiding this from them. So I didn’t. It was a relief, honestly.”

“Rey.” He was truly alarmed by this now. If she’d told them too much . . . “How much did you say?”

“I told them you and I were connected. Through the Force. That we talked when I was supposed to be bringing Luke back. Why I came to you.” Here she looked a little rueful, like she wasn’t entirely convinced she had done the right thing. From her side of things, maybe she hadn’t. “And I also told them that Snoke had created it. And that after he was killed, I hadn’t experienced any sign of it again. They’re not happy with me, but I think it will be okay. I just need to be careful.”

It was weighing on her. He felt a thread of her sadness about it, stranded together with her anxiety at drawing out a new lie, which he shook away after a few moments. Given what she had just told him, something like this was the exact opposite of what she should to be doing.

Kylo sighed loudly and rubbed both hands up over his face and through his hair, the former of which was rough with several days of stubble and the latter of which was getting far too long. It didn’t feel properly clean, either. The lake water was refreshing but never quite as effective as a shower. Being alone for weeks, he hadn’t thought much of any of this. Now, he was far too conscious of it with Rey sitting right across from him, present in a way she had not been since the _Supremacy_ , even if the circumstances could not have been more different.

That fact hit him very suddenly and very hard. She was _here_. Again, she’d come for him, with even less compelling a reason.

He was also conscious of the way she was watching his mouth as it moved, and of the way she knew what it meant. It was a quirk picked up from his father, or perhaps inherited. He’d never thought about it much until now. But with Rey staring and the mention of his mother, it was all he could think of.

“How is Leia?” he asked, spitting it out before he could stop himself.

Rey dropped her eyes briefly before looking back to him. “I thought she would be grieving you. But, as time passed . . . I think she doesn’t believe you’re dead at all. She knows. The way I did. And I don't think she believes my connection with you was severed.” She paused to see if he had anything to say to that. He didn't, for the time being. “She can reach you, can’t she?”

“Yeah. It’s always been that way.” He thought of the moments before he failed to fire on her. Before someone else had. For a while, he’d thought she was gone. “She can probably still sense me.”

“Good.” 

Rey said it almost aggressively, and it occurred to him where this might be heading. His eye twitched and he nearly sneered. “Are you going to tell me now that I need to come back?”

To his surprise, Rey shook her head. “No. You think I’d have brought you things to help you stay if my plan was to take you with me?”

That was fair, but still not what he’d expected. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected.

She went on, dispassionate but not unkind. “I’m not going to tell you to do anything. I tried that, and I was wrong to think it would be that simple. You know what I want.” She forced her shoulders to soften, and she leaned until she could rest her back against the side of the bed. “I still believe you can. Make the right decisions, one day. For yourself. I hope so.”

He looked at her mutely. It was almost infuriating, that unkillable hope of hers, from someone whose life had given her so little reason to have even a fraction of it. But then Kylo remembered how Rey had chosen to come here. She wanted to help him after everything he had done. It was even possible, somehow, that she wanted _him_. It made him think, fleetingly, that maybe she was right. Maybe he could. But not now.

She gave him no time to reply to that. Instead, she reached into her pack again and extracted a pouch of supple dark leather, long and slender and fastened with a cord. Casually, she held it up.

“Do you still want to see the lightsaber?”

He knew exactly what Rey was doing. She was aware that bringing up his grandfather’s lightsaber at an opportune moment—say, when she wanted to avoid talking about why he was or was not going to be returning with her, even now—would be a nearly sure way to redirect a conversation. Lucky for them both, Kylo wasn’t particularly keen to have that discussion right now, either. So he took the bait with only a mild show of annoyance, to her obvious pleasure.

“Is it finished?”

“Yes.” She drew out the word as she picked at the cord that held the bag shut, then slid the saber out and offered it to him with both hands, as if she was inclined to treat it with delicacy despite its deadliness. 

Kylo took it and remained silent as he gave it a cursory look over, nodding a little as he checked it from different angles. Overall it looked nearly the same as it had before its split. Rey had made the hilt slightly longer, perhaps to accommodate the kyber crystal’s fracture, and he could tell where she had needed to incorporate new pieces to replace any that had been beyond simple repair. But it still felt different in a way that had nothing to do with its physical components, even if the hum of life from the crystal within it was familiar. Something in the lightsaber’s makeup suggested it knew it had a new master. It still wasn’t him. For the first time, that was almost a relief.

After a minute or so of this, he cleared his throat and handed it back to her without so much as a sound of approval or disapproval. Kylo knew that would vex her. She’d brought it at least in part because she wanted to know what he thought. She was likely expecting criticism, may even have wanted it if it was about something she could fix or improve. He withheld.

“Have you used it yet?” he asked instead when he picked up on her nettled uncertainty at his silence.

Rey made a noncommittal noise in the back of her throat. “Some. I don’t have much at hand to train against, but I make do with what’s available. The blade’s a bit funny. Like . . . ” She frowned down at the lightsaber as she cradled it in her lap. “Actually, I wondered if you—”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “You don’t even know what I was going to ask.” Her expression suggested that she knew he did, though.

“You were going to ask if I’ll spar with you.” Kylo sounded confident as he said it, but he knew Rey could see some doubt in his eyes. Despite himself, he feared he may have been too presumptuous after all.

But she tipped her head in acknowledgement. “Lucky guess.” 

Kylo smiled tightly and got to his feet. “Yeah, lucky.” 

He held out a hand to help her up, which she looked at briefly before taking. It was still strange to touch her like this after so long, not through the bond but in real, unmitigated flesh and blood. He had to make a conscious decision to let her hand go once she was standing. When he did, he half expected her to disappear. But she remained, pausing only to stretch her legs before following him out the door to take advantage of the abundance of open space and mild afternoon air.

+++

Breathing hard, Rey stared keenly across the grass to Ben, where he prowled in and out of the intermittent shade provided by the trees. The red of his lightsaber crackled against the deep green of the forest behind him; hers, a richer blue, hummed stridently, sparking ever so slightly, where she held it aloft to her right. They circled one another, steps matched in counterclockwise, points in parallel along the perimeter of the hollow. 

This was not going as she had hoped.

As they had made their way out into the wood, Rey thought Ben must have been as lacking for opportunities to practice as she was. For her, training with the saber was still rather new, but he’d likely been doing it every day for years, and he seemed the sort who would miss it sorely. That change in routine could be difficult—she knew, because she sometimes found herself seeking the comfort of old personal rituals from her life on Jakku. When they’d come to a stop in the treeless grassy bowl they had passed through on the way to the encampment, she saw the way many of the trees around its edge had been reduced to jagged stumps, some bearing conspicuous burn marks. He, like she, had been making do as best he could.

It was through these stumps and their yet unruined counterparts that Rey wove now, giving her lightsaber an easy twirl as she watched Ben and tried to determine her next move. Or his. Sparring this way was something she knew she best get the most out of today, because she wasn’t sure when she would have the chance again. And it should have been enjoyable. Instead, it was proving frustrating, and she knew that he was experiencing the same. 

The problem, when Rey worked out what it actually was, seemed incredibly stupid: she and Ben were too well coordinated with one another. This was not simply the way of quickly reading one’s opponent to figure out the best counter-maneuver. It was more an infallible sense of his strategies and reactions, deciding in time with him what his next move would be. Rey was reminded of how it had been to fight alongside him, that underlying awareness of what he was doing, how he was doing it, how he was feeling, if he needed help. Today, it was just a random, inconvenient flash of knowing every few minutes as they fought, but it was intensely distracting when it did occur. 

Thus all the circling. They’d been like this for over a minute now, neither moving to strike, both aware of the other’s consciousness of why this wasn’t working and trying to think of a way around it. It bored her—even if it was proving to hold few surprises, the clash of saber on saber was at least more stimulating than this waiting for one or the other to act. Without warning, Rey gritted her teeth and charged him full out, covering the diameter of the bowl in a few hurtling paces, kicking hunks of grass and dirt in her wake, lightsaber primed to strike. As she’d known he would, Ben set his feet and prepared his body to counter her. 

And there it was, in a flash. She knew, instinct converted instantly to imminent action: _catch her blade with mine, use her momentum against her, knock her off balance, take her feet out from under her_.

At the last moment possible, Rey dropped her right shoulder and raised her empty left hand toward Ben instead, harnessing the Force to hit him with a powerful push when she was still several meters short of striking him with her saber. To her mild surprise, it worked. Ben went flying back and slammed against the tree behind him with a grunt. His lightsaber flew out of his hand. Rey continued her drive forward over the wet grass, skidding a little as she bore down on him and pinned him as he was with her left forearm to his throat and her saber pointed to his gut.

As far as she was concerned, this was the time for him to admit defeat and yield, but he only smirked at her and dipped his chin slightly against her arm where it was still pressed up under his jaw. Caught up in the moment and the rush of endorphins, Rey took another few seconds to realize she still had the blade of her lightsaber perilously close to his body, and she clicked it off. 

“You’re supposed to say you yield,” she said as the hum of her blade cut off, as if Ben had merely forgotten some small nicety. She kept him pinned there, aware that she didn't have to. He could easily have pushed her away by now, too, or called his lightsaber back to him. Instead he was more interested in trying to hold her gaze as she leaned into him. 

“And you’re supposed to keep to the rules we set.” He said it pointedly and with a little difficulty from the pressure she was applying to his windpipe. He wasn’t wrong. When they began they had set a few parameters, which included barring uses of the Force akin to what Rey had just done. Technically, she was cheating. 

She felt his throat bob against her arm as he swallowed hard. She felt the roughness of stubble on his jaw, and the coolness of his sweat, and the heat of his skin. She felt something else, too, strongly emotional and almost animal, that made it difficult to think, something that didn’t come from him or her alone but passed between them. She refused to break eye contact. For a few moments both of them were silent, the only sound that of their breathing still coming unevenly. 

Rey made a face, now far more aware of how close they were to each other than of any arbitrary guidelines she may have transgressed. She let up on his throat, dropping her arm to rest against his chest instead, where his heart hammered through his damp shirt. “They’re just made up rules anyway.”

Ben inclined his head as if she’d made a fair enough point. “I should have known you’d have to resort to cheating to best me.” One of his hands brushed her waist, not remotely by accident, as he reached slowly toward her saber where she held it at her hip. He closed his hand around hers and pulled it toward him a little, still tracking her eyes with his. “Perhaps you should leave that lightsaber with me after all?”

“Hah.” She pushed away from him roughly and easily slipped from his grip. “For a man who needs a haircut and a bath, you’re awfully cocky.”

He wandered away to retrieve his own saber from where it had landed in a clump of brush—and, Rey suspected, to put a bit of distance between them. “You’re going to regret that, guttersnipe.”

“Maybe, but not today. Let's head back. I need a break. We've been out here an hour at least.”

“There should be a few more hours of daylight,” Ben said as he drew up beside her. He hesitated, like his mind was elsewhere, then asked, “How long are you planning to be here?”

She realized he had been afraid to ask, and the question was unexpectedly difficult for her to answer. Rey hadn’t even been thinking of the fact that Charissia would have day cycles just like any other place, of night coming, of having a finite time here. Since she’d arrived, she had been stricken with the feeling of existing almost outside of time. She tried to explain it to herself as the experience of being to any other new planet—or moon—as she had been for the Resistance over the last weeks. But this was different. The idea of time slipping seemed foreign in the face of the connection she had with Ben, which defied logic and space and practically every other convention she knew. She wished she could stay.

“I hadn’t,” she said after trying to think of a more concrete answer and coming up short. “I mean, I don’t know. I didn’t plan, really. Beyond knowing I’d get myself here.” And bringing enough clothing and food to keep herself sorted for a few days if need be. Now she wasn't sure what that need could have been. The trip had not been short, but it wasn’t the sort that required days. “A while longer, I suppose. Enough to make it worth the length of the flight.”

If Ben thought anything of this, he didn’t say so. Instead he gestured in the direction of the lake where she had landed her ship. “I’m going to go down to the water and wash up. You remember the way back to the outpost?”

“Yeah.” Her eyes drifted off toward where he was heading.

“Oh. Do you want to go? Down. First.” He shook his head. “To the lake. To clean up before I do. The water is warmest now.”

“No.” Rey wondered what he would say if she said she wanted to go with him. Not that she was planning to. “Go on, I don’t know if I’ll bother. I’ll wait back where we came from.”

The way his mouth twitched suggested he thought she definitely should bother, later if not now, but waved her off. “All right.”

Her trip back to the camp was uneventful, though she took a bit longer than necessary because she kept pausing to look at the trees, or an animal she thought she’d seen, or some other novel thing. It was a remarkably lovely place to be stuck, if one decided to keep oneself in exile. But still Rey found herself waiting, and after a few minutes of loitering near Ben’s ship she began to feel bored again.

She first tried to address this by inspecting the ship more closely. In her entire life, Rey didn’t think she had ever seen a ship that so unmistakably resembled its owner. Dropping down, she crawled beneath it, popped back out the other side, and began circling it to have a good look at the design and state of it, running her hands over the dark metal, which had become very hot as the sunlight beat down on it over the course of the day. She was disappointed, but not surprised, to find that she could not open it to look inside the cockpit, even after she wrapped her hands and clambered onto the fuselage to peer through the viewport and tamper with the hatch. Rey had never been inside a functional TIE fighter before, though she’d been in plenty of gutted ones, often as the person doing the gutting. This was clearly an updated model, perhaps one-of-a-kind, and a very well-made one at that, thanks to its origins. She decided she would ask to have a closer look later. She didn’t think he would deny her that.

Still, that didn’t help right now, and so next Rey decided she would explore the three huts that Ben had not claimed. But the first two were utterly devoid of anything interesting, even to her trained scavenger’s eye. Whoever abandoned this place had not been in a rush, and they had gone above the call of duty to strip it of anything that might have value. The third was slightly more promising, though it quickly became apparent that Ben had already done some scavenging of his own, judging by the way things seemed to have been recently disturbed, and in a not-very-careful fashion. What looked to be a pile of very old, dirty, and moth-eaten bed linens was discarded just inside the entrance, a few broken bowls were tossed aside in a corner, and a very obvious trail in the dust and dirt on the floor started as a rectangle against one wall and dragged a thick line halfway across the room before, presumably, whatever made it had been lifted and carried the rest of the way.

Thus, Rey then found herself back in Ben’s own hut, wishing he would hurry up and get back, and doing a bad job resisting the urge to snoop. The bed was made with a military precision that was utterly incongruous with the rest of the place’s makeshift appearance; the stove in the corner bore a pot and pan; the fireplace had been cleaned out but not used since; which led her to the trunk. Rey knew it was considered impolite, but she would only have a quick peek. It probably just contained whatever had been in his ship’s survival kit, maybe some other things Ben had deemed crucial in his rushed departure. He hadn’t locked it. He had not had a reason to.

She was crouched before it, her fingers only just prying it open, when his voice from behind startled her enough to make her drop the heavy wooden lid with a definitive thunk.

“Looking for anything in particular?”

Rey straightened up swiftly and turned. “I—no. I was just having a look around. I shouldn’t have been looking in there. I didn’t. Yet. Good timing. Though you took long enough.”

Ben was standing by the stove, shirtless and dripping water onto the floor from his hair and the wet shirt he had balled up in one hand. Rey had seen him enough times like this to no longer find it embarrassing or feel like she needed to force herself not to stare. But she still liked to look, which was possibly more troublesome, and so missed whatever it was he had just dropped in the pan. 

“I was getting dinner.” He said it like it should have been obvious. 

“We’re having dinner?” she asked, glad at least that he didn’t seem to care that he’d caught her about to start pawing through his personal effects. She supposed she _had_ told him she had no plan to leave immediately, and she remembered now what he said about a few hours of daylight left. 

Ben looked at her with almost tangible skepticism. “You’re not hungry?” 

“Not what I said.” 

She folded her arms and approached the stove, peering into the pan. There were four rather large and very dead fish inside. The sight did indeed remind her that she was getting hungry. And it also, briefly, made her remember Luke, living his eccentric hermit’s life on an isolated island planet with his fishing and other unsettling routines. She hoped that wasn’t what was about to start happening to Ben. Pushing that thought and the temptation to stare at his naked torso from her mind, she looked up at him and said, “Looks like I can take back that food I brought, you’re clearly not starving out here.”

“Sure. Leave the fruit packets though, I like those.” 

She nodded slowly, glancing back to the fish. “I remember.”

The corner of his mouth ticked up in a small smile—he’d been doing that a lot since she arrived here, and she didn’t hate it—and he stepped around her. “I need to prepare these. Are you going out there now?”

Rey wrinkled her nose. She wasn’t a strong swimmer, or even a passable one. She could tread water, which was about all that had kept her from drowning in that cavern on Ahch-To, and she had no great love of the idea of being in large bodies of it. Still, she could see why the lake was, in this case, a good idea. There was a lot of sweating involved in a hour-long sparring session with the only person whose skill level matched her own. 

“You’re telling me I should, aren’t you?”

“No.” But the way he said it indicated he might be as he leaned over the trunk, opened it, and extracted a knife and a fresh shirt.

She groaned, then retrieved her pack from where she had left it next to the bed, threw it heavily over her shoulder, and trudged past him toward the door, sparing another look at him from behind as she did so. Part of her hoped the water was cold—it might do her some good right now. “I’ll be back.”

When she arrived at the lake again, the first thing she did was give the E-wing a quick check. Not that she thought Ben would have done anything to it, but he probably hadn’t thought she would be poking around his ship and house in his absence, either. After finding everything as it should be, Rey looked around, needlessly confirming that she was indeed alone, stripped off her still sweaty clothing, and cautiously waded into the lake.

Despite her wishes as she set out regarding water temperature, she was happy to find it was still fairly warm even as the light was beginning to fade from the sky, and its depth increased only gradually. Some sense allowed her to remain confident that the silty bottom beneath her feet wasn’t suddenly going to drop off and leave her floundering. When she got to a point that the water reached her neck, Rey experimentally tilted back to let herself float. 

In this way she watched the sky for a while, as the wispy clouds went from white to pale yellow to orange and the color around them became purplish. She let the water cover her ears and flush out the sounds of the dying day, closed her eyes and allowed herself to pretend she was floating in a vacuum, imagined the Force taking her in. It wasn't so different. She thought about what Ben was doing here, why he still wouldn’t come back—how she’d known he wouldn’t—and what she was still doing here now that she had what she’d come for, which was assurance he was alive and a fuller understanding of what had happened. What she would do after this.

Rey indulged in the solitude a bit longer, but as the sky continued to darken she righted herself and pushed her way back to shore, feeling cleaner and fresher and more alert than she had when she arrived. And hungrier. She let the air dry her skin as she ran her dirty clothing through the shallows a few times and wrung them out, then pulled a dry set from her pack and dressed quickly just as the temperature became too cool to comfortably forgo it any longer. She reentered the woods at a brisker pace than she’d used on her way to the lake, eager to return and eat, and to be with Ben a bit longer before she departed.

Despite the deepening darkness beneath the trees compounding Rey’s unfamiliarity with the path, it was not difficult to stay on track. She knew it was because of Ben—she just felt where he was, and that it was where she should be. The less she thought about where she was heading, the more easily the way revealed itself to her in the grey of twilight. Soon she could smell smoke, and something cooking, and not long after that could see through the trees the dim flickering of light from the outpost. 

As she neared the edge of the encampment, something brushed against the top of Rey’s head, and she felt compelled to stop despite her single-minded interest in her destination. She looked up and saw a low-hanging tree branch. It curved and dipped down like a whip, touching her face lightly as if in greeting. The length of it was lined with dark, waxy flowers and spiny leaves that curled in spirals. 

She recognized those. She had kept one of the same blooms that once made it through the bond to settle on her. It was dried out by now, but she preserved it anyway and stored it away with the Jedi texts in her room at the base. On a whim, Rey reached up and plucked a few, pausing just long enough to rest them in her pack before continuing on her way.

**Author's Note:**

> And we are honing in on the end. Next week we (hopefully) round everything out. Cheers!


End file.
